


In All This Darkness

by Miss_M



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Bodily Functions, Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Incest, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-IT (2017), Suicidal Thoughts, Time Loop, Time loop – ends when the looper does the thing they least want, Time loop – watching the character you love die again and again, Violence, mention of harm to animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:41:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22232704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Beverly helped defeat a cosmic evil, fought off her father, kissed a boy she wanted to kiss, and got her ticket out of Derry. But Derry wasn’t ready to let her go.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2019





	In All This Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radchaai (rigormorphis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rigormorphis/gifts).



> I own nothing.

On the day she was supposed to leave Derry, the neighbor’s radio woke Beverly up. Radio Derry was playing recent hits: _I get frightened in all this darkness, I get nightmares, I hate to sleep alone…_

Beverly rolled over in her bed so she could see the sunbeams falling on the floor, for once clear of all her clutter. Her backpack and her mother’s old suitcase sat by the door, which was closed and locked out of habit, even though her father was gone, in the hospital with a cracked skull or in jail, Beverly hadn’t asked. Beverly’s old boots were next to the luggage, and a clean dress and leggings hung from a hanger on the back of the door. 

Lying motionless in her bed, Beverly suddenly didn’t want to leave. She barely knew her Aunt Margaret, and all her friends were here, in Derry. As were that bitch Greta Bowie, Henry Bowers and his goons, all the adults who’d never thought to ask how Beverly was managing, living alone with her father. And the house on Neibolt Street, always watching.

Beverly shook off her mood and got out of bed. Her aunt had said she’d be there by ten o’clock, and Beverly had to mail the letter to the landlord so he’d send the security deposit to Portland, put away the dishes she’d washed last night, and turn off the gas. If she had time, she’d take her bike for one last ride down Main Street and out to the quarry. If she saw any of the other Losers, she could say goodbye one more time, so Richie could tell her to stop being such a fucking girl, and Bill would stutter even worse than usual, and all the others would stare at the ground and scuff their shoes in the dirt. She could jump in the quarry one last time and get in her aunt’s car with her hair dripping green water, like the creature from the black lagoon…

The phone rang. 

“Hello?”

A male, official-sounding voice asked her her name and was she related to a Margaret Wallace from Portland, Maine? 

“She’s my mom’s sister,” Beverly said, feeling her heart beat faster. “My aunt. Has something happened?”

Just that her aunt wouldn’t be picking her up that day, or any other day. The dead couldn’t drive, especially when they became dead by crashing their cars into electrical poles alongside straight, empty roads out on the edge of Derry County.

The man didn’t ask if Beverly had anyone else to stay with, or if he could call someone for her. She hadn’t really expected it – adults let basically anything slide in Derry. She hung up, feeling sick though she hadn’t yet eaten breakfast. She hadn’t known her aunt, not enough to either love her or hate her, so what she felt wasn’t exactly grief. Kind of like when her mother had died and Beverly had been too young to fully grasp what that meant, Beverly felt panic and shame: with her aunt dead, how would she get out of Derry now? Where would she live? Not even in Derry would they let a thirteen-year-old girl live on her own, surely.

Beverly grabbed her keys, ran down the exterior stairs, and mounted her bike. She pedaled as fast as she could, her empty stomach growling, until she got to Bill’s house on Witcham Street, but no matter how hard and how long she pounded on the door and called his name, no one answered. The house didn’t look deserted – the little flag sticking up on the mailbox, fresh tire marks on the gravel driveway – yet all was silent as the grave. Beverly left when she felt eyes on her from the house across the street, though she saw no one twitch a curtain or duck out of sight behind a closed window.

No one answered her at Ben’s place either. She didn’t know where Richie lived, or Stan, and she didn’t want to risk running into Eddie’s mom just then. 

Mike’s grandfather’s farm was far enough out of town that it was early afternoon by the time Beverly reached it on her bike, exhausted, thirsty, and sweating through her dress. 

Sheep baaed at her from their pen, tools lay on the barn floor – weren’t farmers supposed to be tidy? – and a pickup truck sat parked outside the house. The kitchen door was unlocked, so Beverly let herself in.

“Mike?” she called. “Mr. Hanlon? Anyone?”

Still and silent as the grave. Beverly looked in the fridge and the cupboards, took some bread and ham and cheese and a jar of mustard, and poured herself a glass of tap water, then washed her plate and knife and rinsed the glass. She didn’t see a notepad of any kind, no shopping list on the fridge, not even an old envelope, so she left the two dollars she had in her dress pocket on the kitchen table and hoped the Hanlons wouldn’t be too disturbed to find that a very polite, hungry burglar had called on them while they were gone.

Where had everyone gone?

Pedaling slowly back into town while the sun set behind her, casting her long, misshapen shadow on the road before her – a girl with wheels – Beverly wondered if she would pass anyone walking in the street, meet any cars on the road. She’d have been almost happy to see Henry Bowers’ jacked-up Trans Am just then, but she met and saw no one all the way home.

She let herself back into the apartment, ate the bread roll she’d saved up with the leftover milk she was going to have that morning for her last breakfast in Derry. Then she kicked off her boots and socks and rolled herself up in her coverlet without bothering to undress. She didn’t even close and lock her bedroom door. It was only eight o’clock, but Beverly shut her eyes and waited to fall asleep, wanting this day to be over. The radio was still playing in the next apartment, but she heard no footsteps, no clink of cutlery, no voices calling to each other. Only crickets and easy listening.

*

_It isn’t safe to walk the city streets alone…_

Beverly’s mouth felt stuffed with wool because she’d slept with her mouth open. Her stomach ached as soon as she woke. Not cramps – hunger. She’d had barely anything to eat yesterday, and she’d pedaled all the way to the Hanlon farm and back, and all over town.

 _Anticipation runs through me_ , Eddie Money sang, and Beverly wondered blearily why the local DJ loved that stupid song so much.

She washed her face, brushed her teeth, drank tap water to try and settle her stomach, but it only hurt worse. Her dress smelled under the armpits, so Beverly took it off and wandered out to the living room and the kitchen in her bra and leggings. Not like anyone would see her.

A wrinkled paper bag sat on the kitchen counter, in the same spot where just such a bag had sat yesterday, waiting for Beverly to eat its contents for breakfast, crumple it up, and throw in in the trash. 

Beverly’s heart beat painfully. She forced her legs to carry her across the kitchen, her hands to lift and open the paper bag. 

A bread roll. Just the one, for her last breakfast in Derry.

Beverly dropped the paper bag back on the counter, not caring that the roll fell out and landed on the floor. She rushed into the living room and picked up the phone. The signal was clear and strong, and no one was calling her. 

She hung up and stared at the phone, willing it to ring, for either the official-sounding man to tell her her aunt was dead, or for Aunt Margaret herself to let her know she was running late and would be there soon. Then Beverly would know yesterday was a weird dream, no biggie given what all had happened that summer. 

The phone sat still and silent under her gaze. 

Beverly didn’t pick the bread roll up off the floor. She didn’t try calling anyone, she barely remembered to dig a clean, wrinkled dress out of her suitcase and put it on before she rushed out, not even bothering with locking the door or bringing her keys, and hopped on her bike. She didn’t go to the police – the new chief of police had been friends with Henry Bowers’ father and would be no use to her, even if he was there – or try any of the Losers’ houses.

Beverly pedaled in the direction opposite the one leading to the Hanlon farm, through the empty and silent streets, and out to the quarry. It seemed as good a place as any to have a nice, relaxing nervous breakdown and try to figure out what the hell was going on.

Emerging from the pine trees at the top of the bluff overlooking the flooded quarry, Beverly nearly fell off her bike when she spotted a human figure outlined against the sky on the edge of the steep drop down to the water.

The figure turned, and Beverly couldn’t see his face since he was backlit by the sun, but she recognized the curly hair and the defensive pose, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“Stan,” she called out. Her voice sounded annoyingly feeble. 

“Hey, Beverly.” 

Beverly dropped her bike in the dirt by Stanley’s bike and ran to him. She suppressed the urge to hug him – of all the guys, even Richie, Stan would have borne it the worst.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Dunno. Couldn’t think of anything better to do.” He sounded so _normal_ , a little tetchy and a little reasonable, Beverly wanted to thump him for not freaking out like she was.

“Are the rest of the guys with you?”

Stan gave her a look. “Do you _see_ anyone else here?”

“Okay, okay.”

“I haven’t seen them since yesterday.”

“Okay! Um…” Beverly tried to concentrate: she and Stanley had rarely interacted one on one, so she was unsure of how to talk to him, and it was important that this next bit not come out sounding weird. She didn’t think she could handle Stan having a meltdown on top of her own confusion right now. “Stan, are your parents at home?”

Now Stan looked worried. “Of course they’re home. Where else would they be? Are you feeling okay, Bev?”

“I’m fine,” she said and laughed. She was the opposite of fine. 

Stan peered at her for a moment longer, then, apparently satisfied that she hadn’t gone funny in the head, turned back to staring at the quarry, as he’d been doing when Beverly had found him.

“You know what I’m thinking?” Stan said. 

Beverly was still busy trying to figure out whether Stan’s parents being home was a good sign or a bad sign, and what he would think if she asked to meet them, right then and there. “What?”

“I think I wanna go for a swim.” Stan bent down and started unlacing his sneakers. “It feels like a good day to take the plunge, you know?”

By the time Beverly had gathered her wits, Stanley had taken off his shoes and placed them neatly side by side on a flat rock, rolled up his socks and stuffed them one in each shoe, and laid his watch on top.

“You’re going swimming in your clothes?” was the best she could manage. 

“Sure, why not?” Stan smiled at her. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

He turned his back on her, crouched like at the start of a race, and took off for the edge of the bluff without waiting for a response. Beverly didn’t know what to say, she was just sure that something was very wrong: Stan wasn’t a risk taker, he didn’t do stupid shit just for fun, and she’d never heard him invoke his feelings as a reason for doing or not doing anything before. He’d never do something so irrational as to take off his watch but then ruin his street clothes in the water. 

“Stan, wait!” Beverly called out, but Stan took a deep breath – she could hear him suck in oxygen – bent his knees, and launched himself off the edge of the bluff.

“Geronimo!” Beverly heard him shout as he fell and she ran to look for him from the top of the bluff. 

She saw Stanley disappear into the green, murky water. Bubbles erupted briefly where he’d breached the surface, floated for a few seconds, and popped out of existence one by one.

Beverly held her breath and squeezed her fists, willing Stan to emerge. He couldn’t hold his breath for long, he was one of the weakest swimmers in the Losers Club. 

Stan stayed under, and he stayed under, and he stayed underwater some more. Beverly’s lungs burned, she exhaled and inhaled, and held her breath again, when finally Stan bobbed to the surface.

He floated face down, his arms flung out and his hands immersed in the water, a red stain spreading on the green surface of the water around his head. Grownups used to often scold kids not to go diving in the quarry because of the big, sharp rocks supposedly lurking in the shallow water, but Beverly had never heard of anyone actually getting hurt before. 

She didn’t bother with taking off her shoes or her dress before she jumped in feet first. Once the water closed over her head, she tried to pull her legs up to her chest, just in case her feet and shins met sharp, jagged rock, but her body met nothing save water and pondweed. It took her forever to drag Stan’s body to the shore, using one hand to hold him up and her free arm to swim, but a part of her knew it was no use long before she managed to drag him out of the water.

Dead weight. Dead Stan. 

The early September day was sunny and warm, but Beverly sat shivering on the shore beside Stan’s lifeless body, hugging her knees to her chest and choking back tears. Once she stood up, determined to ride her bike back into town and knock on every goddamn house door until she found someone alive and able to help.

She went three steps before she remembered that, even if she found them, an ambulance would be useless – Stan’s skin had a bluish tinge, and he wasn’t breathing – and the police would probably arrest Beverly. The girl who’d hit her father with a toilet water-tank lid and now dragged her friend’s dead body from the quarry, all in the span of just a couple of days. No adult would bother to look further for what might have happened.

Her own train of thought pulled Beverly up short – she was thinking about how little time had passed since the Losers had gone to the Neibolt House and fought It. But Stan had said that he hadn’t seen any of their friends since yesterday, when Beverly had spent all of yesterday riding all over deserted Derry…

Beverly’s clothes were starting to dry on her body, making her shiver even harder as the afternoon shadows lengthened. She looked around the quarry, the trees, the bluffs: all empty, no clownish figure grinning its red smile at her from anywhere. 

She didn’t bother going home as night came on. She was not afraid of badgers and foxes, and she didn’t like to leave Stan all alone at the quarry. Beverly lay on her back on the rocky shore, staring at the stars, Stan lying still and silent near her, and waited for morning to come and prove her deduction wrong.

*

Eddie Money was singing to her: _I feel the hunger, it’s a hunger that tries to keep a man awake at night…_

Beverly rolled over, away from the window, the sunbeams, and the sound of the radio, and pressed her face into her pillow, groaning. Sometimes it really, really sucked to be right. 

Ben had said that Pennywise wouldn’t be back for another twenty-seven years, but Derry had definitely gone even weirder than it had been before. The only thing Beverly couldn’t figure out was why the weirdness seemed to be targeting her specifically.

Well, her and Stan. Stan who died at the quarry on never-yesterday. 

The fact that Stan’s death had slipped her mind filled Beverly with shame, which in turn made her furious. Maybe Stan wasn’t dead today. This today, rather than never-yesterday. This today, maybe Stan didn’t exist at all, and Beverly couldn’t decide whether that was better than him being dead.

She didn’t bother looking in the kitchen to check whether the paper bag with the uneaten roll was back on the counter, before she rushed down the stairs and grabbed her bike. 

She considered picking a direction at random and just seeing what happened, but she knew she’d have to go back to the quarry eventually: if Stan’s body was still there, that would mean that something had changed, or time did continue to flow somehow, not just in a circle. 

Beverly pedaled hard and soon passed the last buildings along Main Street. Halfway to the quarry, cutting through the field that sloped down from the train tracks, she heard someone calling her name.

This time, she did fall off her bike.

When she’d picked herself up, wincing at her skinned knee and elbow, she looked around, expecting a clown, not daring to hope for Stan, alive and well, and saw Bill running toward her through the grass, waving to her.

The smile which broke across Beverly’s face almost hurt. Despite everything, despite her suspicions about what was happening, she was so glad to see Bill. 

“Beverly!” He reached her at last, panting and flushed.

“Hi, Bill. Where did you come from?”

“S-S-Something weird’s h-h-happening.”

 _Yeah, no shit_ , Beverly thought. “Weird how?”

“Weird like everyone’s g-g-gone, weird. I t-t-tried to go for help, but I c-c-couldn’t get out of town.”

A warm breeze sighed through the long grass, lifting the hairs on the back of Beverly’s neck. “What do you mean, you couldn’t leave town?”

“I don’t know. The road’s there, but I couldn’t get farther than county limits.” Bill’s stutter was clearing up as he got into his story. “I tried walking, biking, and nothing. It’s like…”

“Like something doesn’t want us to leave,” Beverly interrupted.

Bill stared at her. “Like It d-d-doesn’t want us to leave.”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“Yeah. Shit.” 

Beverly laughed. “Pretty much.” She took Bill’s hand. “I’m glad you’re still here.” 

She ignored the chill that ran down her spine at the memory of Stan at the quarry. Bill’s eyes shone as he squeezed her hand. 

“Where were you g-g-going?” he asked. 

“To the quarry. I… had this idea that some of you guys might be there.” It wouldn’t do any good to freak Bill out with her suspicions about time running in circles, cutting Derry off from the rest of the world.

Bill tugged on her hand. “Come with me.”

They walked off the road, into the grass, where Bill had left his backpack. He rooted around in it and pulled out two walkie-talkies. 

Bill held one out to Beverly. “I’m going to follow the t-t-train tracks as far as I can. You go to the q-q-quarry. We’ll k-k-keep in touch with these.” 

That was just like Bill – trying to get a handle on the situation, always trying to save everyone, even if there was hardly anyone left. Beverly turned her walkie-talkie over in her hands. A few smudged letters had been written in green sharpie on its side. She made out two G’s and an R.

“Okay,” she said. “You be careful.” Then she leaned in and kissed Bill on the cheek. 

He blushed. “Wh-wh-what was that for?” he said, like he hadn’t been the one to kiss her first on never-yesterday. 

“I don’t know,” Beverly said. “Suddenly I thought I might never see you again.”

Bill was staring at her like he wanted to say something, but he said nothing. Beverly returned to the road and her bike, and went on to the quarry. 

Stan’s body was nowhere to be seen, and neither were his shoes and watch on the bluff. Beverly turned on her walkie-talkie. “Come in, Bill. There’s no one here. How far did you get?”

Static answered her, followed by the long, loud whistle of a moving train. Beverly could almost feel the shudder of the wheels on the tracks, the vibration of the earth at the freight train’s passage.

“Bill? Come in, Bill. Are you on the train?”

More static. More thunder of steel on steel. Quieter and somehow more distant than both, Bill’s voice, calling to her. Bill’s frightened voice, her garbled name giving way to a scream. The noise of the train seemed to be bearing down on her from the walkie-talkie, its whistle a shrill mockery calling her name too, and Beverly hit the off switch with a shaking finger. 

She stood in the silence by the quarry for a long moment, watching the spot where Stan’s shoes and watch were not, before she turned her back on the bluff and the water, to fetch her bike and return to the train tracks and follow them as far as the county line. She already knew what she would find. She hoped there would be enough left of Bill for her to recognize him, his head smashed open, his limbs like ground beef scattered over the train tracks.

Numbly, Beverly wondered who had been driving the train, if the new rules of time’s passage in Derry said that only one other person could be around, aside from her, and then die, leaving her all alone till not-tomorrow. 

*

“Shut the fuck up!” Beverly screamed at her bedroom ceiling, the sunlit window, and the radio crooning at her mockingly from next door: _Are you the answer? I shouldn’t wonder…_

She threw back her coverlet, sat up in bed, and ran her fingers through her hair, tugging sharply on the ends already curling past her ears. Her stomach ached again, and she was so thirsty. 

She pulled her hands away from her hair and looked at them: clean, although she’d gathered up bloody bits of Bill’s body in the gathering dusk and fallen asleep sitting by the train tracks, cradling his severed head while owls hooted around her and mice and voles rustled in the grass.

Beverly sniffed her fingers: they didn’t even _smell_ of blood. Her stomach twisted, howling in protest, and with a groan she heaved herself upright and went to eat the last bread roll sitting on the kitchen counter.

After breakfast, Beverly sat outside on the stairs and tried to think. She needed information. She needed to talk to the one person who’d pieced together the most about It and Derry, but she didn’t want to bring him into danger. It wasn’t fair! If Beverly was being punished, there was no reason for all the Losers to suffer. Especially not Ben.

She’d digested her breakfast and was starting to feel hungry again before she mustered the energy to get up and fetch her bike, feeling about a hundred years old. Moving and doing something, anything, was better than sitting still and being hungry.

She found Ben at the library, all alone in the reading room with several thick, leather-bound volumes, his school notebook, and an open bag of M&Ms spread out before him. 

Beverly made herself put on a bright smile before he looked up and saw her trudging toward him. “Hey, new kid.”

“Beverly! Hi!” Ben reached for a pencil, then for his bag of candy, before folding his hands on top of his notebook, his cheeks as red as Santa’s hat. “What are you still doing here?”

Beverly affected a nonchalant shrug. “My aunt’s running late. Thought I’d stop by and hang with you for a bit.”

“Oh.” Ben’s flush deepened. “Is… Is your aunt really coming?”

Beverly felt her smile slide right off her face. “I doubt it. Everything is really weird, you know? I mean, even weirder than before.”

“Yeah.” Ben took an M&M and popped it in his mouth. He saw Beverly eyeing the bag and held it out to her. “Want some?”

She stopped herself from grabbing the whole bag away from him and took only a few M&Ms. “Thanks.”

She sat across from Ben and munched on candy in silence for a few moments. “Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“What is going on? If anyone knows, I figure you know.”

Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. Something is definitely wrong. My mom was gone this morning, and the neighbors too. The librarian’s gone. Everyone’s gone.”

“Except you and me.” 

That made him smile, startling Beverly – she knew Ben had a soft spot for her, that was why he put up with her teasing him about his taste in music, but she hadn’t expected him to be so happy about the two of them being the last ones left in Derry. Ben looked even happier to see her than Bill had done. 

“Ben, I’m scared,” Beverly said and felt sure she would burst into tears, and a part of her didn’t want to embarrass herself, not even in these circumstances, not even in front of Ben. 

“Me too,” Ben said.

Beverly laughed and dashed the tears from her eyes. She could imagine many worse scenarios than sitting with Ben in the library, eating M&Ms, and making as much noise as they wanted without anyone shushing them. 

“Hey, do you wanna see something cool?” Ben asked. His new enthusiasm wilted at once. “Well, I don’t know if it’s cool. It’s something I’ve been practicing.”

Beverly crossed her legs Indian-style in her chair. “Go on, new kid. Impress me.”

She saw it coming this time. Or maybe she saw it coming again. Beverly remembered Stan’s flying leap from the bluff and Bill’s plan to follow the train tracks, when all their parents had always warned them not to play there, as she watched Ben take an M&M, show it to her like a magician about to perform a disappearing act, throw it in the air, and catch it in his open mouth. His beaming smile was replaced at once by a look of confusion as a sound like a clogged drain issued from his throat and his face turned purple. 

Beverly was out of her chair, calling Ben’s name, wishing she’d paid more attention when they were shown the Heimlich maneuver in health class, knowing it was all useless.

She sat on the floor beside Ben’s motionless body and held his cooling hand for a long time, till her head started to hurt because she’d cried so much. Then she stood up, sat in Ben’s empty chair, and reached for his bag of M&Ms, not even caring if they choked her too. Crying always made her so hungry. 

*

_Take me home tonight_ , Eddie Money crooned, _I don’t wanna let you go ‘til you see the light…_

 _I see the light_ , Beverly thought, lying in her bed. _No one gets out of Derry alive._

She tried to visualize the map of Derry that Bill had shown them that day in his parents’ garage. The map had shown only Derry township, not the whole county, and Beverly had never known for sure whether the Hanlon farm lay within Derry County or across the county line. She’d reached the farm without problem the first time she woke to Eddie Money sounding like a stalker on the neighbor’s radio, but maybe the rules had changed since then. 

Only one way to find out, and anyway, it wasn’t like Beverly had anything better to do. 

She wasn’t at all surprised to find Mike in the barn, by the sheep pen. His grandfather and the farmworkers were nowhere in sight. 

Beverly joined Mike by the pen and reached inside to pet a sheep on the head. “Hey, Mike.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t really know. Trying to get out of Derry alive, I guess. What are _you_ doing?”

Mike held up a sleek metal tube with a black handle, a bit like a gun in _Star Trek_. “Gotta slaughter the meat for the next delivery. No one else is around, so I’m taking care of it.” 

He eyed Beverly, and she wondered at the cool expression on his face, like they weren’t friends, just people whose paths sometimes crossed in town. 

“You wanna help?” he asked, and Beverly withdrew her hand from the sheep’s warm head.

“No,” she said. She would have gladly helped him, but not to kill sheep, not when he looked at her so coldly. Even the grin he gave her was cold. 

“You know, my grandfather says there are only two places you can be in this world – out here like us, or in there with them.” He jerked his head at the sheep, his eyes still on Beverly. 

“So if Derry’s the pen, what does that make us?” Beverly asked. She didn’t want to argue, but Mike seemed to be spoiling for a fight, and she had plenty to be angry about as well. 

Mike’s grin grew even wider. For a moment, he looked just like Pennywise, mouth full of teeth, and so hungry. He brandished the bolt gun. 

“Sheep don’t kill and eat other sheep, but people do,” he said. Beverly wondered if he meant that people killed and ate sheep or other people. “Or they do when they have a better weapon. This thing jams half the time.”

Mike pointed the bolt gun at the sheep standing nearest to him and pulled the trigger. Beverly gasped, her hands flew to her face, but nothing happened. No whistle of a bolt leaving the barrel, no spatter of sheep brains all over its fellow captives. Mike laughed and jiggled the bolt gun in the air.

“See? Useless,” he said and pointed the bolt gun at his own temple. “I’ll have to go in there and slit their throats myself.”

Beverly dropped her hands from her mouth, started to take a step closer to Mike, started to say _Don’t_ , but it was no use, as before. 

The bolt gun made a muffled sound, and the bolt shattered Mike’s right temple into a bloom of bone and blood, exiting halfway out of his left temple, where it stuck out like a screw in Frankenstein’s neck. Mike had just enough time to look confused before his knees buckled and he faltered sideways and sprawled on the barn floor, his blood running down the floor’s built-in incline toward the concrete channel that would collect it and let it flow outside, so it didn’t mess up the whole barn.

The sheep milled around inside their pen, baaing and clustering away from the pen wall closest to Mike’s corpse. Beverly managed to stay upright till she’d reached Mike’s side, then she folded down to the floor, her knees in the puddle of his blood, and reached for the bolt gun in his lifeless hand. 

It only took one bolt at a time, and Beverly didn’t know how to reload it or where the spares were kept. She dropped the bolt gun in her lap and buried her face in her hands. It was only lunchtime – a long time to wait till not-tomorrow. 

*

_I can feel you breathe, I can feel your heart beat faster_ , the song mocked Beverly. 

She understood enough by now to know she wasn’t in any immediate danger herself, only the one other person in town was sure to die shortly after she met them. She knew that the person she met would always be someone important to her, and never the same person twice – at least, not yet, maybe Derry would cycle through all her friends and then start over. Maybe next time Stan would want to show her his father’s hunting rifle, or Bill would ask her to go paragliding over the quarry…

She suspected that the people she met were being influenced by the fuckery affecting space and time in Derry. Mike was never that cold and casually cruel before, when yesterday and tomorrow still meant something. Ben was never so blasé about weird shit, or Stan so lackadaisical about his own personal safety and convenience. And Bill… okay, Beverly had to admit that Bill had remained more or less himself, still committed to fighting evil and helping others, and it hadn’t helped him one little bit.

They’d defeated It, or as near as defeated It, because they’d all stuck together. Now, when it was just Beverly and whoever, the whoever was a sitting duck. Beverly didn’t want to put anyone else in danger, but she suspected Derry wouldn’t be put off that easily, and she couldn’t stand the thought of sitting alone in her apartment all day, listening to the radio and waiting for not-tomorrow.

“Eddie, I need some of your pills,” Beverly said as soon as Eddie opened the door to her. 

She was fairly confident that Eddie’s mom wasn’t around, but still glanced down the hallway behind Eddie in trepidation. Wouldn’t it be just like Derry to break its own rules so that Mrs. Kaspbrak could again accuse Beverly of being a dirty, nasty girl trying to pollute her precious boy!

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Eddie demanded, paused for a long, hacking cough, and continued: “What are you doing here? _How_ are you here?”

“I need something for my nerves, or…” Beverly took in Eddie’s stunned expression and bit back the _something poisonous in large doses_ part of that sentence. “Come on, Eddie, don’t you have a valium or something?” 

Eddie scoffed. “I have allergies and severe asthma, Beverly. I’m not a retard or a psycho.”

“Oh my God!” Beverly pushed past Eddie into the house. “What about your mom? You cannot tell me she doesn’t pop sedatives like they’re candy.”

Eddie trailed her down the hallway. “Okay, first of all, that’s a double negative and really not how you’re supposed to talk. Second of all…”

Another long coughing fit interrupted him. Beverly turned to find Eddie bent double in the middle of the hallway, droplets of blood appearing on the floor before him. 

“Eddie, what’s wrong? Where’s your inhaler?”

Eddie shook his head, coughed like he was choking. Something more solid than blood and much bigger than a single drop dangled from his mouth and fell to the floorboards with a dull _plop_.

“I feel like I’m coughing up a lung,” Eddie choked out. “My mom is gonna kill me when she sees the state of this floor…”

“Oh, fuck your mom!” Beverly grabbed Eddie by the armpits and half carried, half dragged him into the sitting room, and dumped him in the easy chair facing the TV.

Eddie tried to laugh, but could only cough. “You sound like Richie.” He bent over the armrest and expelled more solid, bloody stuff onto the floor. “Beverly, what’s happening to me? I can’t have TB, I got a vaccine!”

He sounded so terrified, Beverly couldn’t think of anything better to do than to kneel by the easy chair and stroke his hair. “I don’t know, Eddie. I don’t know…”

She didn’t want to cry, but it came bursting out of her in great waves of tears and snot. Eddie shrank away from her.

“You’re drooling all over me!” he protested. “I don’t need more germs _from you_ , you know.” 

Beverly had to laugh at his indignation. “Just shut up and lie there and cough up your lung,” she said.

Much to her horror but not to her surprise, that was exactly what Eddie proceeded to do over the next hour. After he was dead, Beverly searched all the cabinets in the house, but didn’t find any tranquilizers or even bleach. Mrs. Kaspbrak used all non-toxic cleaning products because of Eddie’s allergies. At least the kitchen was stuffed to bursting with food, so Beverly fried herself a couple of eggs and some bacon and ate them with buttered toast and a big glass of chocolate milk, feeling very decadent. 

While the night thickened outside, she sat in Eddie’s kitchen and thought back to her deductions about the effect Derry had on its remaining population. It had made Mike, Stan, and Ben a bit coarser, or just less sensitive than they had used to be, but Bill and Eddie had remained themselves: boys with some rough edges to them and plenty more vulnerabilities for Derry to play up. And it was making her, Beverly, into more of an asshole. _Definitely more of an asshole_ , she thought and got up to pour herself a second glass of chocolate milk, while Eddie lay dead and covered in his own blood and lung tissue in his mother’s easy chair.

*

“Be my little baby,” Beverly hummed in her best falsetto while pedaling her bike down yet another country road within county limits, then dropped her voice into an approximation of Eddie Money singing to her that morning: “I feel the hunger, it’s a hunger…”

She bit off the lyrics and stopped her bike when she found Richie, as she expected she would after Eddie had died on never-yesterday. It was Richie’s turn.

Richie sat by the side of the road near the covered bridge, his bike in the grass beside him. He was plucking stalks of grass and throwing them like tiny javelins into the field before him, but the individual stalks fell as soon as he let them go, or the breeze blew them back at Richie. 

“So when you jack off, is that how it goes too? Sad and all over you?” Beverly asked with a bright smile, walking her bike up to Richie.

He barely glanced at her before resuming his scowl at the grass. “Fuck off, Molly Ringwald.”

Beverly let her bike drop and sat beside Richie. “I’m worried about you, Richie.”

“I said, fuck off! You get fucked in both ears so much, you got a hearing problem? Go away and leave me alone.”

Beverly grabbed his arm but he shook her off. 

“Listen to me,” she said. “Derry is fucked, and you know it, and I’m worried it’s going to harm you next. You’re the only one that’s left.”

“What the fuck are you even talking about?”

“You’re going to slip and fall in the bathtub, or get run over by a driverless combine harvester, or I dunno, get eaten by cows or wild dogs or something. You and I are all we have left, and we don’t have a lot of time, so we need to put our heads together and think. Richie, please.” 

Richie stood up, wiping his grass-stained hands on his short pants, and started to walk away from Beverly. 

“You’re fucking cracked,” he said without looking back. “I’m not staying within five miles of you, for all I know you’re planning to kill me yourself. Well no, ma’am! Richie Tozier doesn’t need some sad, desperate…”

Beverly was up and following him, but she didn’t have time to come up with anything suitably cutting to interrupt his tirade before Richie’s voice got drowned out by the revving of a car engine.

Beverly saw Richie glance behind her and turn white as a sheet. Turning, she was more outraged than surprised to find how Derry had changed the rules on her.

Henry Bowers’ Trans Am was bearing down on them, kicking up dust, and there were definitely people inside, their voices hollering over the engine noise. The car pulled over just past where Beverly and Richie stood, knowing there was no sense in running. Bowers and three others stepped out – two of Bowers’ goons and a younger, blond boy Beverly didn’t recognize, but Richie did, if the soft gasp he uttered was any indication. 

“Well, merry Christmas!” Henry Bowers leered. “We got the faggot _and_ the town bike. Get ‘em.”

Beverly tried to evade capture on pure instinct, but she had no weapon to hand, not even a rock, and she wouldn’t run and leave Richie to the wolves. 

One of Bowers’ meathead friends twisted her arms behind her back, while the other one and Bowers himself knocked Richie down and started kicking him. 

“Stop it!” Beverly screamed. “Leave him alone!”

“What are you waiting for, Connor?” Bowers told the blond boy. “Get in here and give ‘im what’s coming to ‘im. Or do you want some of this too? And you,” he shouted Beverly down. “Shut up, your turn’s coming.”

The blond boy hesitated for a moment, but then he rushed at Richie and landed a kick right in Richie’s ribs. Richie made a noise like a balloon deflating, and blood started to dribble out of his mouth. 

“You motherfucker!” Beverly raged at Henry Bowers. “You don’t even see what’s happening, do you? Everything you are, everything about you, is just the, the, the _rot_ of this town made flesh, and all you can think to do with all that evil inside you is to beat up smaller kids. You’re nothing, Bowers!”

A click, and the sunlight caught on the switchblade in Bowers’ hand. He advanced on Beverly while his two friends kept beating on Richie, who was no longer making any conscious noise. 

“I’ll slice your tongue right out of that smart mouth and make you eat it, you cunt,” Bowers growled. 

“Where’s your other friend, Hockstetter?” Beverly taunted. “Haven’t seen him in a while, have you? What _is_ the last thing you remember before today, huh, genius?”

The verbal swerve confused both Bowers and the goon holding Beverly enough that Beverly could stomp down on her captor’s foot and wiggle out of his arms. She circled sideways, so she could keep them both in her sight. 

Bowers waved his knife in her face. “You see your little faggot dead-meat friend over there? You’re next.”

Beverly spared a glance for Richie where he lay motionless and bloody, the other two guys moving away from him and toward her, before she faced Bowers again. She grinned so widely, her face hurt. 

“You can kill me too, but you cannot make me watch,” she said and with a wordless scream ran straight at Bowers and his shiny, shiny knife. 

*

“Aaaargh! What the fuck?” Beverly screamed upon waking in her bed. “Who else is there who can die on me?”

 _I need some company, a guardian angel, to keep me warm when the cold winds blow_ , Eddie Money replied unhelpfully.

Beverly checked her torso, her arms, her legs – a few bruises on her arms, scabs forming on her knee and elbow from when she’d fallen off her bike, but no stab wounds or anything worse than that. So her body registered the passage of time, despite the circularity of Derry time, but not the manner of her dying? 

“What the fuck, what the ever-loving…” Beverly muttered as she got out of bed. She broke off when her stomach lurched and squeezed like a fist, and she felt the telltale onrush of thick blood beginning to drip between her legs. 

“You have got to be kidding me.”

She took a moment to stick her hand out of her window and flip Derry off, before she crab-walked down the hall to the bathroom and fumbled for the box of tampons on the top shelf, hidden behind spare rolls of toilet paper. Crouching over the toilet, she tried to do everything like the instructions on the box said, and found it no easier than the handful of times she’d needed to do this in the past.

She hadn’t bothered to shut the bathroom door. Despite everything that had happened, or was happening, her father’s appearance in the doorway still managed to scare the bejesus out of Beverly. 

She started violently, sat down on the toilet, and dropped the tampon on the floor. She could smell her own blood, and so could her father if the expression on his face was anything to go by. His head was wrapped in a thick bandage, and his eyes ran up Beverly’s body, from her bare feet, to her hand trying to cover her privates, to her face, before settling on her soiled panties discarded on the floor. 

“Oh Bevvy,” her father said in that mock-sad tone which always sent shivers down her spine. “You’re not even trying to be my little girl anymore, are you?”

Beverly hadn’t thought to check since the time fuckery began, but somehow she knew what she would find when she twisted sideways on the toilet seat and reached behind her with both hands: the water-tank cover made of heavy porcelain, in one piece and back in its place, despite having come to Beverly’s aid once before. Derry was imaginative in its torments, but not that much, or maybe it enjoyed giving Beverly a fighting chance.

Whatever the reason, Beverly didn’t let this go to waste. She surged up from the toilet seat, ignoring the blood dripping down her thigh, and smashed her father under the chin with the heavy lid. His head snapped back with an audible crunch, then he collapsed against the open bathroom door and lay sprawled on the floor, his head hanging on his shoulder like his neck was cooked spaghetti. 

Beverly forced her breathing back to normal, then she placed the water-tank lid back, cleaned herself up with toilet paper, and got a fresh tampon from the box. With her eyes closed, so she wouldn’t have to look at her father’s corpse, it took her even longer to get the tampon in but finally she managed. 

She washed her face and her armpits, put clean clothes on, and went outside. She rode her bike to the Neibolt House and jumped off in its overgrown front yard. The gaping windows and crooked door leered at her as they always did, only now all of Derry was like that house: empty and watching her.

“Alright,” Beverly shouted up at the house. “You got me. He was my dad, and I loved him despite everything. Does that make you fucking happy?” 

She didn’t expect an answer, and none was forthcoming. 

Beverly spread her arms, let them drop. “You win. I’ll stay. I won’t try to leave again. But I _will_ keep trying to save them. Do you hear? I’ll stay here, in Derry, and you can have me all to yourself, but I’ll keep fighting you until you kill me for real. _Do you hear me?_ ”

The last warm breeze of summer soughed through the long grass surrounding Neibolt House and lifted Beverly’s hair off her face. The house seemed to be saying _aaaaaaaahhhh_ in replete satisfaction, like a carnivore after a big meal.

 _Or maybe not satisfaction_ , Beverly thought distantly as several bicycles crunched in the gravel behind her. _Maybe in disappointment. Or it’s just bored now – It’s bored for now…_

“Beverly!” she recognized Bill and Ben’s voices calling out in unison.

“Hey, Bev!” Eddie, a moment later.

“Hey, Raggedy Ann, what the fuck are you staring at?”

Beverly turned slowly, put her back to the house, and smiled, her face nearly hurting with it. 

“Hey,” she told the six Losers facing her. 

“Wh-wh-what are you doing here?” Bill asked, darting a nervous glance at the house.

“Yeah, your aunt’s looking all over town for you,” Stan told her earnestly. 

A car passed down Neibolt Street, the driver honking its horn at the kids to get out of the way, the Derry Radio DJ joking from the car radio about a new New Kids on the Block song. An ice-cream van’s tinkle could be heard from the cross street two blocks over. 

“She is?” Beverly asked once they were all assembled on the grassy verge, between the road and the house’s front yard.

“Duh, yeah,” Richie said. “She’s going psycho, saying someone’s kidnapped you.”

“Oh. I’d better get back, then.”

Beverly bent to retrieve her bike but she didn’t mount it. She started walking it slowly down Neibolt, toward the intersection with Turner and on into town, the other Losers walking their bikes in a loose flock around and behind her. She wanted to ask if anyone’d seen her dad in town, but she knew they wouldn’t have. Time was flowing one way again, and the morning in which she’d killed her father was a little whirlpool off to the side of that main flow, same as Stan jumping in the quarry, and Eddie coughing up his lung in his living room, and all the rest of their deaths. _Death by Derry_ , Beverly thought.

They were half a block away from where Neibolt crossed Main Street, and from there it was a two minutes’ walk to Beverly’s apartment building. She stopped abruptly and turned to the guys.

“You shouldn’t follow me all the way home,” she said. “My aunt would want to meet you all, and it would just make me leaving harder.”

There were some murmurs from the boys, some eye-rolls, but also a lot of downcast eyes and shoes scuffed on the pavement. Beverly knew she wouldn’t ever tell them about the never-yesterdays when they’d died, one by one. She suddenly realized that she hadn’t dreamed at all while time had run in a circle, and she remembered all the scary, shitty things she’d seen while Pennywise had held her captive, and she couldn’t tell her friends about that either. They shouldn’t have to carry that through life! Having to grow up in Derry was more than enough. 

“Listen, you’re all going to leave too, right?” she said. “You’ll leave Derry as soon as you can?”

Bill and Stan nodded.

“I’m going away for college,” Ben said.

“College?” Richie scoffed. “Nerd. I’m getting out as soon as I turn eighteen, going to Reno to play pro poker with naked girls sitting on my lap.” He humped the air and nearly dropped his bike. 

Stan gave him a look. “That’s Vegas, moron.”

“They have pro poker and naked girls in Reno too! I saw it in a magazine.”

Eddie chimed in: “Oh yeah, which one? Your dad’s _Playboy_?”

“No, your mom’s _Good Housekeeping_ ,” Richie batted back. 

“Guys,” Bill interrupted the hubbub. “Beverly’s saying goodbye.” 

“She already said goodbye yesterday,” Richie said. “How many goodbyes…”

“Richie, shut up,” Eddie told him, and amazingly Richie did. 

Beverly smiled at them all. “Yeah, I _am_ saying goodbye. For real this time.” She looked Richie in the eye, and he only made a tiny grimace in response. 

Then Beverly looked at Eddie and let the warring impulses inside her reach a compromise – not to burden the guys with what she knew, but to say at least something to someone, and Eddie had made Richie shut up for her and was so nervous all the time anyway, Beverly figured he needed to be forewarned most of all. 

She said: “Eddie, if you ever meet Pennywise again, make sure you don’t let him get behind you, okay? Just don’t turn your back on him.”

Eddie’s face fell. “What?”

Bill frowned and mouthed _What?_

Richie grinned from ear to ear. “ _WHAT?_ ”

“Are you okay, Beverly?” Ben asked.

Eddie was twitching and darting glances up and down the street like he expected to see Pennywise appear at any moment. Beverly laid her hand on Eddie’s arm.

“Just trust me on this,” she said. 

“Yeah, ‘cause if he gets behind you, he could slip you his clown sausage,” Richie rushed to add.

“Shut up,” Eddie shouted. “You’re the one that’s scared of clowns anyway.”

“Am not, not anymore.”

“Oh my God!” Eddie looked like he might explode on the spot. “You’re such a liar. You…”

Mike sidled up to Beverly while Eddie and Richie shoved each other and Bill told them to knock it off, and pointed at something behind her. “I think that’s your aunt now.”

Beverly glanced behind her, and sure enough, there was Aunt Margaret bearing down on Beverly and the guys, with her tear-stained face and her determined stride. 

Beverly put on a smile for her aunt and hoped she wasn’t in too much trouble because she’d wandered off for one last bike ride on her last morning in Derry. She hoped none of the guys would cry as they watched her drive away, because it would embarrass them and Richie would never let them live it down – especially if it was Richie himself who cried. 

Aunt Margaret was nearly upon them. She called Beverly’s name. 

Beverly hoped the guys too would get away free and clear, and none of them would have to see Derry ever again. A breeze bearing the first hint of fall frost came down Main Street, fluttering Aunt Margaret’s skirt, lifting the hair on Beverly’s neck, and causing Eddie to break off his squabble with Richie behind Beverly’s back, only to declare that he’d left his jacket at home and if he caught a chill, his mom would kill him. 

Someone was definitely going to cry before Beverly left Derry at long last. She just hoped it wouldn’t be her.

**Author's Note:**

> I interpreted the "watching the character you love die again and again" a bit loosely. Title is from this fic’s musical leitmotif, “Take Me Home Tonight” by Eddie Money.


End file.
